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Show 450 PLATEAU OF CAXAMARCA. and led to the Golfo de San Miguel. We know that Columbus (Vida del Almirante por Don Fernando Colon, cap. 90) sought for an "estrecho de Tierra firme ;" and in the official documents which we possess of the years 1505 and 1507, and especially 1514, mention is made of the desired ((opening" (abertura), and of the pass (passo) which should lead directly to the ((Indian Land of Spices." Having for more than forty years been occupied with the subject of the means of communication between the two seas, I have constantly, both in my printed works and in the different memoirs which with honorable confidence the Free States of Spanish America have requested me to furnish, urged that the Isthmus should be examined hypsometrically throughout its entire length, and more especially where, in Darien and the inhospitable former Provincia de Biruquete, it joins the Continent of South America; and where, between the Atrato and the Bay of Cupica (on the shore of the Pacific), the mountain chain of the Isthmus almost entirely disappears. (See in my Atlas geographique et physique de la Nouvelle Espagne, pl. iv. ; in the Atlas de la Relation historique, pl. xxii. and xxiii.; Voyage aux Regions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, t. iii. pp. 117-154 ; and Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, t. i. 2de edit. 1825, pp. 202-248.) General Bolivar, at my request, caused an exact levelling of the Isthmus between Panama and the mouth of the Rio Chagres to be made in 1828 ftnd 1829 by Lloyd and Falmarc. (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the year 1830, pp. 59-68.) Other measurements have since been executed by accomplished and experienced French Engineers, and projects have been formed for canals and railways with locks and tunnels, but always in the direction of a meridian between Portobello and Panama- or more to the west, towards Chagres and Cruces. Thus the most important points of the eastern and south-eastern part of the Isthmus have remained unexamined on both shores ! So long as this part is not examined geographically by means of exact but easily obtained determinations of latitude and of longitude by chronometers, as well as hypsometrically in the conformation of the surface by barometric measurements of elevation-so long I consider that the statement I have repeatedly made, and which I now repeat |